A Guide To Sustainable Housing

Defining sustainable housing:

The overriding principle in sustainable housing is ensuring it promotes a better quality of life and involves less waste, better reliability, lower life-cycle environmental impacts, less maintenance, and more reuse.

Why is Sustainable Housing Important?

Traditional building processes is both resource intensive and wasteful and has a deep impact on the environment. Waste is not just measured in terms of excess materials; it can be defined as the unnecessary use of land, time, and ultimately financial return. By designing housing with sustainability in mind, we are able to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of the future generation to survive and thrive. Green homes are a great alternative to conventional homes in every application. Not only can homeowners boast reduced resource use and waste during construction, but they can also enjoy long term energy and water savings, a higher standard of living and many financial benefits.

The housing sector plays a substantial role in the current environmental crisis, but it has the potential to offer one of the largest possibilities of any sector to mitigate global climate change. Global urbanization is fastest in the developing countries and slums and informal settlements are rapidly growing making affordable sustainable housing strategies crucial in this context.

Sustainable housing practices are still weak in developing countries and need support to bring housing solutions to scale. These solutions should be seen as a comprehensive process taking into account environmental, social, cultural, economic and institutional matters. The whole life span of a house needs to be considered from the very beginning.

Demonstration projects concerning affordable sustainable housing are important to test, influence and inspire, but scaling up sustainable housing practices is fundamental and should be the main goal.

Resources Used By Building and Housing Sectors:

Fresh Water Consumption 12%

Total Waste & Major Pollution 40%

Total Energy Consumption 40%

Residential & Commercial Energy Consumption 60%

Methods for building a green home:

Design

Ensure that new rooms or structures are designed to be an appropriate size and with energy efficiency in mind.

Building Materials

Select renewable or recycled building materials. Look into green alternatives to concrete, source your timber wisely, and choose non-toxic paints and finishes.

Energy Generation

Depending on your location you may have several options available in terms of renewable energy. Do your research on solar panels, wind power and micro-hydro and enjoy reduced energy bills forever!

Water Management

Install a rainwater collection and greywater system to reduce water usage. If you are thinking about putting a pool in your garden, look into eco-pools.

Heating and Cooling

Ensure that your home is properly insulated to reduce the need for heating and cooling. If you must install a cooling system consider a ceiling fan or energy efficient air conditioner.

Garden

Ditch your thirsty lawn for a food garden, indigenous cottage garden or drought-resistant garden.

Design Consideration

Housing improvement is one of the most important sectors of the economy, which ensures the prosperity of urban development and sustainability. The variety of design solutions and innovative technologies incited a lot of challenges in the quality of accommodation and satisfaction of residents. Often, designers strive to maintain the aesthetics of housing appearances and neglect the actual needs of clients.

Compared to commercial buildings, the residential design must correspond to day-to-day concerns of people’s lives and address problems related to their life experience and ambience. Thus, for successful sustainable housing development, an optimal balance between sustainable housing and customer satisfaction is required.

Long-term holistic building process

The whole process of building should be thought of from a sustainability point of view: planning, implementation, operation and maintenance, demolition, disposal and recycling of materials should be considered already when designing housing. Architectural interventions such as location, orientation, size and form of the building and choice of material are as important as sustainable engineering.

It is especially important for developing countries to connect building processes with strategies of economic development, cultural preservation and social empowerment and participation of communities. Knowledge sharing, partnerships and cooperation between all actors working within the sustainable housing sector should be encouraged.

Support for mainstreaming

Sustainable housing practices needs to be supported by government interventions in order to up-scale and make the sustainable housing sector stronger and more affordable. Both the building sector including architects, engineers, construction companies and the private households or consumers have a tendency to stick to the practices and habits they know. These practices are focused on short-term cost efficiency.

In order to make sustainable housing practices a mainstream strategy for the building and housing sector, knowledge sharing, advocacy, policy guidance and financial incentives should be considered. Campaigns and promotion should be used to present alternative ways of building and spread the knowledge of sustainable housing practices.

Sustainable practices should be made part of governmental policies and building codes in order to facilitate large scale projects that results larger scale research, product development and better affordability. Subsidies and economic incentives can attract households to use sustainable ways of building. These subsidies can also assist the private sector to offer services, materials and products that are sustainable.